Report calls for Aboriginal imprisonment options

Posted
February 04, 2013 20:14:00

Aboriginal imprisonment rates are still high despite the Royal Commission into deaths in custody calling for jail to be a last resort and, now, a report is making economic as well as social arguments for providing options to incarceration.

LEIGH SALES, PRESENTER: Aboriginal people make up just 2.5 per cent of Australia's population, yet they account for 26 per cent of the country's prison inmates. Governments have long pledged to turn that around, yet it's now more than two decades since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody urged that prisons be a last resort. As Bronwyn Herbert explains, another report released today calls for investment in drug and alcohol rehabilitation as an alternative to prison.

BRONWYN HERBERT, REPORTER: Actor Dean Daley-Jones is a regular visitor at Casuarina Prison, one of Perth's largest jails.

Here, 278 Indigenous men are behind bars. That's almost half the number of total prisoners.

Daley-Jones, who is best known for his role in the movie Mad Bastards, grew up with prisons a constant in his life.

DEAN DALEY-JONES, ACTOR: My first Christmas, I remember, was in Fremantle prison with my mother and one of my sisters. And I just saw lots of Aboriginal men. What's going - I didn't really digest that or understand that until later.

BRONWYN HERBERT: In his 20s, he too became a statistic. Fuelled by alcohol, he was repeatedly locked up for assault.

DEAN DALEY-JONES: My mother wrote a letter to me once when I was locked up for the weekend in Fremantle Watch House. And she gave it to the sergeant and the sergeant gave me this letter and I read this letter and she had some key points in it. She said I didn't bring you into this world to see you, um, you know, end up like this.

BRONWYN HERBERT: The statistics are shocking and extraordinary. Despite Aboriginal people making up just 2.5 per cent of Australia's population, one third of all female prisoners are Aboriginal and a quarter of all male prisoners are Indigenous. On average, more than 1,000 teenagers are locked up in juvenile detention centres every night and over half of those are Aboriginal boys, the majority committing crimes while intoxicated. That creates a pressure cooker environment.

Just two weeks ago, inmates destroyed a juvenile detention centre in Perth. The teenage detainees are now locked up in an adult prison while the centre is being repaired.

TED WILKES, NATIONAL INDIGENOUS DRUG & ALCOHOL COMMITTEE: Certainly people who induce that to occur, if there were leaders amongst them, should be reprimanded in an appropriate way. But if you're talking about 74 kids, I know that not all of those 74 kids would've wanted to do what happened. I know that some of those 74 kids would've been caught up on the coattails of others.

BRONWYN HERBERT: Indigenous leader Ted Wilkes is furious that little has changed over the decades.

TED WILKES: Prisons as a last resort was promised to us in 1991 with the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. It hasn't happened.

BRONWYN HERBERT: The National Indigenous Drug & Alcohol Council commissioned accounting firm Deloitte Access Economics to investigate how much could be saved by diverting non-violent offenders into treatment instead of prison.

TED WILKES: Too many of our mob that haven't already got a record, these young fellas that are being caught by the cops, so they don't qualify to be diverted to either counselling around first offence or to any other form of diversion. So, we need to seriously look at how we do it for Aboriginal Australians.

BRONWYN HERBERT: The report released in Canberra today shows it costs a whole lot less to have young offenders on programs that deal with the most common causes of breaking the law: drug and alcohol abuse.

LYNNE PEZZULLO, DELOITTE ACCESS ECONOMICS: By diverting Indigenous offenders into rehab rather than into the prison system, you could save about $111,000 per prisoner in a year for each offender who is diverted and that comes from a variety of different savings, in particular differences in costs between the prison system and the rehab facilities, but also because of other positive outcomes such as reduced reoffending rates that are associated with the rehab facility and better health outcomes.

BRONWYN HERBERT: Around $3 billion is spent annually on Australian prisons. At the same time, a number of drug and alcohol services to assist Indigenous people have been wound back or cut by governments around the country.

BYRON WRIGHT, ABORIGINAL DRUG AND ALCOHOL COUNCIL (SA): In South Australia alone we've just had the only rehabilitation centre that allocated for the whole family close down. And for the Aboriginal community, there's not that much assistance in there.

Byron Wright overcame a drug addiction that landed him in and out of jail from his teens. At 38, he learned to read and write and went on to complete tertiary education.

BYRON WRIGHT: I think personally a rehabilitation centre for myself would've been a lot better than going to jail.

BRONWYN HERBERT: Indigenous leaders are using the report to show reducing the high rates of incarceration is not just a social justice issue, but an economic argument.

TED WILKES: I've decided that this'll be a lifetime commitment for me. This is just not fair.

DEAN DALEY-JONES: Yes, we do have rapists and murderers and those people need to be cared for and kept away from society. I can't speak on their behalf, but I can speak on behalf of fellas who've had no guidance from - no good role models of guidance and they're just making silly mistakes, but they're getting locked up for it and the taxpayer pays this money.